“Got banned one day after the official release. Thought I got detected for using RPM tools, because the game was crashing for it at that time,” one guy lamented. “Bought the game again… didn’t hack on it at all, just wanted to enjoy the game a bit. Two days later—banned again. Bought the game… again. But before doing that, I deleted Overwatch and launcher completely. Enjoyed it again without cheating only for a day.”

The next time around, he changed his hard drive IDs, the PC’s MAC address and some registry and BIOS info, and even bought a VPN.

“Went to buy the game once again, played it for a bit,” he said. “And got banned in-game… without using any sort of cheats/hacks”.

Oh, boo hoo. You didn’t even use cheats or hacks that time? Here’s a medal. You’re so obviously rehabilitated and stuff.

“We’re committed to providing an equal and fair playing field for everyone in Overwatch,” said Blizzard in an update on Battle.net. “And will continue to take action against those found in violation of our Terms of Use.”

I’m all for banning cheaters, but I’m not so sure such a hard stance is necessary.

This is just a (video)game, on the regular, public online mode (I assume), not pro-league competition. By all means ban that instance/copy of the player’s game and flag the player as a cheater with a permanent attribute on their public profile/history, which should effectively ensure no chance of a professional/competitive career. This zero-tolerance strategy however – continuing to ban after the player (with a single offence) clears their system of the hack and buys a new copy – seems excessive. It goes beyond enforcing fair play, extending into something that smells like heavy-handed punishment by the power-holder and I’m not convinced that’s okay. It’s then made worse by there not being clear policy documentation of exactly what a banned player can expect, and an FAQ covering questions like “what if I buy a new copy?” I haven’t found any such documentation, and in my opinion their forum posts are not good enough.

To waffle on this a little more, I would advocate a tiered ban structure – first offence, no competition for six months or a year, in addition to the game copy being banned permanently. Allow playing again with a new copy but only after some time (say, a month). For the second offence, lifetime competition ban, game copy ban, and a new-copy play ban of some longer time (three to six months maybe, and maybe only allow them in non-ranked games or something). Third offence brings the total perma-ban, ala what’s happening now – no playing again, even with a new copy and clean system. To support this, though, the timelines involved and the actions required of the cheater to play again after their offences will need to be made clear – again, that is not something we seem to be seeing.

The music was a nice touch 😉

Jawid

This guy managed to buy the game like 5 times and here I am scraping enough coin to get it during a sale -_-

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